Time course of processing emotional stimuli as a function of perceived emotional intelligence, anxiety, and depression.
- 1 January 2010
- journal article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Emotion
- Vol. 10 (4), 486-497
- https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018691
Abstract
An individual's self-reported abilities to attend to, understand, and reinterpret emotional situations or events have been associated with anxiety and depression, but it is unclear how these abilities affect the processing of emotional stimuli, especially in individuals with these symptoms. The present study recorded event-related brain potentials while individuals reporting features of anxiety and depression completed an emotion-word Stroop task. Results indicated that anxious apprehension, anxious arousal, and depression were associated with self-reported emotion abilities, consistent with prior literature. In addition, lower anxious apprehension and greater reported emotional clarity were related to slower processing of negative stimuli indexed by event-related potentials (ERPs). Higher anxious arousal and reported attention to emotion were associated with ERP evidence of early attention to all stimuli regardless of emotional content. Reduced later engagement with stimuli was also associated with anxious arousal and with clarity of emotions. Depression was not differentially associated with any emotion processing stage indexed by ERPs. Research in this area may lead to the development of therapies that focus on minimization of anxiety to foster successful emotion regulation.Funding Information
- National Institute of Mental Health (F31 MH068123, P50 MH079485; R01 MH61358; T32 MH19554; T32 MH 067533)
- National Institute on Drug Abuse (R21 A14111)
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